Ivy Club

Ivy Club
U.S. Historic district Contributing property
The current clubhouse as viewed from Prospect Avenue in a 1909 photographic postcard
Location	43 Prospect Ave, Princeton, New Jersey
Coordinates
Built	1897
Architect	Cope and Stewardson
Architectural style	Jacobethan
Part of	Princeton Historic District (#75001143)
Added to NRHP	27 June, 1975

The Ivy Club is the oldest eating club at Princeton University, and it is "still considered the most prestigious." It was founded in 1879 with Arthur Hawley Scribner as its first head.

The Club, as described by F. Scott Fitzgerald in This Side of Paradise (1920), is "detached and breathlessly aristocratic," a description which continues to be accurate to this day. A more recent account described Ivy as the "most patrician eating club at Princeton University" where members "eat at long tables covered with crisp white linens and set with 19th-century Sheffield silver candelabra, which are lighted even when daylight streams into the windows."

Ivy Hall, built to house Princeton's short-lived law school, later the first home of The Ivy Club, to which it gave its name

The Club was one of the last to admit women, resisting the change until Spring 1991 after a lawsuit had been brought against Ivy Club, Tiger Inn, and Cottage Club by student Sally Frank. The members of each class are selected through the bicker process, a series of ten screening interviews, which are followed by discussions amongst the members as to whom of the remaining to admit. Current undergraduate members host regular "Roundtable Dinners" featuring talks by faculty and alumni.

The first clubhouse was Ivy Hall, a brownstone building on Mercer Street in Princeton that still stands. It had been constructed by Richard Stockton Field in 1847 as the home for the Princeton Law School, a short-lived venture that lasted from 1847 to 1852. From the time of its founding until its incorporation in 1883, the Club was generally known as the "Ivy Hall Eating Club."

In 1883 the Club purchased an empty lot on Prospect Avenue, which was a country dirt road at the time. Ivy erected a shingle-style clubhouse in 1884 on what is today the site of Colonial Club. The clubhouse was remodeled and extended in 1887-88. Following Ivy's move to new quarters across Prospect Avenue some ten years later, its second clubhouse was used by Colonial before being sold and moved to Plainsboro Township, New Jersey.

Ivy's third and current clubhouse was designed in 1897 by the Philadelphia firm of Cope & Stewardson. In 2009, the Club completed its most significant renovation to date. The expansion added a second wing to the facility, changing the Club's original L-shaped layout to a U. Designed by Demetri Porphyrios, the new wing includes a two-story Great Hall and a crypt to provide additional study space.

Notable alumni

The following is a list of some notable members of the Ivy Club:

• Hobey Baker – World War I fighter pilot, member of the Hockey Hall of Fame and U.S. Hockey Hall of Fame
• James A. Baker III – Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan; Secretary of Treasury and Secretary of State for George H. W. Bush
• Lem Billings – confidante and "first friend" of President John F. Kennedy who was Kennedy’s freshman-year roommate at Princeton
• Joshua B. Bolten – White House Chief of Staff and Office of Management and Budget director under George W. Bush
• Philip Bobbitt – constitutional law scholar and author of The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History
• Lauren Bush-Lauren – fashion model and niece of George W. Bush
• Joey Cheek – speed skater who won gold and silver medals in the 2006 Winter Olympics and co-founder and president of Team Darfur
• Leonard S. Coleman, Jr. – president of the National League
• Frank Deford - author and sports commentator
• Richard B. Fisher – philanthropist and chairman of Morgan Stanley
• Moira Forbes -- president and publisher, ForbesWoman
• Bill Ford - Ford Motor Company
• Thomas F. Gibson – first political cartoonist of USA Today and Director of Communication under Ronald Reagan
• John Marshall Harlan II – Associate Justice, United States Supreme Court
• Frederick Hitz – Inspector General of the Central Intelligence Agency
• Arthur Krock – four-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist
• A.B. Krongard – executive director of the CIA
• Jim Leach – U.S. Congressman from Iowa and chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities
• Blair Lee I – United States Senator from Maryland
• Blair Lee III – Governor of Maryland
• Michael Lewis – author of Moneyball and Liar's Poker
• Allan Marquand – logician whose Marquand diagram was a forerunner of the Karnaugh map
• Richard King Mellon – financier, banker, and philanthropist who led the urban renewal of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• John Aristotle Phillips – entrepreneur specializing in political campaigns who became famous for attempting to design a nuclear weapon while a student.
• John Rawls – political philosopher, author of A Theory of Justice, originator of the concepts of original position and veil of ignorance
• Laurance Rockefeller – venture capitalist, philanthropist and environmentalist
• Randall Rothenberg – president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau
• Saud bin Faisal bin Abdul Aziz – Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister
• Arthur Hawley Scribner – first head of the eating club and president of publisher Charles Scribner's Sons
• Booth Tarkington – Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist
• Jim Thompson – OSS officer and Thai silk entrepreneur who famously and mysteriously disappeared in Malaysia in 1967
• Terdema Ussery – president and CEO of the Dallas Mavericks professional basketball team
• Rodman Wanamaker – arts patron, aviation pioneer, and founder of the Professional Golfers' Association of America (PGA)
• Woodrow Wilson – U.S. President, 1913–1921 (Associate Graduate Member)
• John Gilbert Winant – Governor of New Hampshire and U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom

External links

• Official Ivy Club Website
• History and culture of the clubs, at Princeton's official site.
• Further information on the renovation from James Bradberry Architects website
• At Ivy Club, A Trip Back to Elitism from the New York Times